Description
A moving novel about love, loss, and the beauty in the things we can't always see.
Paige Wilding has her future mapped out — the Year 10 Art prize. Graduation. A coveted spot in an elite art school in New York. But when she's diagnosed with an incurable eye disease, the perfect life she’s planned starts to blur.
She makes a choice to keep her condition secret and live louder, love wilder, and paint like her life depends on it. Only her best friend Jazz knows the truth, and is helping her cram a lifetime of colour into a single year.
But as her sight fades and she’s forced to give up painting, it’s Zac, her rival for the art prize, who helps Paige find a way back to her art and a new kind of beautiful; messy and imperfect but also raw, unfiltered and fiercely alive.
A powerful story about choosing real over perfect.
Review
Paige has just been diagnosed with Stargardt’s disease - a degenerative eye disease that initially appears as a dot, but slowly worsens to the point of being legally blind.
Despite this news Paige and her best friend, Jazz, are determined to make this their best year ever. And so with a few daring pranks and Jazz posting the stunts online, they quickly become cool.
This is exactly what Paige wanted, but as her sight worsens it becomes harder to disguise it from her now quite large friendship group, and her outlook slowly changes. She really just wants Jazz to herself, and to spend time on her lifetime passion, her painting.
Eventually, Paige joins a support group and falls for her previous nemesis, the one who always challenged her for the school art prize, Zac. He shows her that even with reduced vision she can still follow her dream of becoming an acclaimed artist.
A New Kind of Beautiful is a brilliant contemporary novel that deals with not just the impact of Paige's diagnosis and learning to live with a rare disease, but also with social media, changing friendship groups, the power of dreaming and the achievement that comes with trying to be your best, regardless of the circumstances. It also explores what art can be, and I absolutely loved immersive art in the ending.
It is a terrific story that will best suit readers aged between 13 and 17 years.
